Why Is the Internet So Slow?

Amberly Dressler

Posted on 8.31.2015

Those running a Web-based operation have plenty of monitoring capabilities to detect whether their servers or data centers are healthy or not, but they typically don’t have a way to monitor what’s going on outside of their data centers.

Cedexis, a software as a service company, has released Radar Live, a real-time Internet outage and performance map to remind enterprises just how much is happening on the ‘Net based on real user management (RUM) information (rather than virtual end-users or synthetic agents).

The free Radar Live service shows users the most significant events (e.g. anomalies in latency or availability changes) Cedexis has seen on the Internet based on data from its Cedexis Radar Community.

The Radar Community has grown to move than 800 large enterprises that have deployed the Radar tag, including such enterprises as LinkedIn, Nike and others.

Most Web professionals are familiar with the concept of adding tags to their websites, but the Radar tag, according to Cedexis VP of Marketing and Business Development, Rob Malnati, is not measuring anything per say. Radar is not identifying who website visitors are, but rather only caring about the kind of experience they had when they engaged on that website. For example, users who visit LinkedIn on their browser are now part of the Radar community, because Cedexis knows what kind of experience they had.

All of this information is compiled into a real-time map of Internet performance, which includes more than 130 clouds and content delivery networks (CDNs). Users can even drill down to only look at major cloud availability outages, minimal cloud latency issues or other specific areas of interest. What’s more, users can drag the timeframe to see how long an anomaly lasted, how many ISPs were involved and more, so companies can see how their users may have been impacted.

In short, Cedexis is benchmarking info from 40,000 networks and every major cloud and CDN platform in the world and providing this information for free to anyone who accesses the site. Why? It's simple. Those who see how much is going on around the Web may consider the Cedexis Openmix product, which automatically re-routes traffic around these different Internet events that have the potential to negatively impact website performance (and, as a result, decrease conversions, search engine visibility, etc.).